Saint Peter’s Wolf Read online

  At first dawn, an aching, cold dawn, I ate snow to ease my thirst. The light was bleak, brown rust in a gray sky. I dragged myself ever north, and at last surmounted a spine of snow that overlooked a field of wrinkled ice.

  It was a great, cold-mummified river, a glacier. The air was thin, and painful to breathe. I did not have the power, for the moment, to move from where I sat on my haunches. Slaver had frozen on my chest, and ice clotted my eyelashes.

  The litany was still comforting: I would heal soon. My strength would return to me. I was close to my kind.

  At last the scent of dung brought me around, and I half-slid down a slope. The black curl on the ice was not fresh, but it told me: male. And farther on a fading amber stain on the ice told me: male in charge of this place. And it told me: leave now.

  What froze me then was not the sight of an animal, nor the sound of one. It was the sight of something that did not belong, an orange cone in the face of a hill. A human dwelling. The structure was empty, as far as I could tell, but I trotted toward it, curious and alert.

  It was a small A-frame, smelling of pine tar and a recent coat of varnish. A stove vent pierced one roof, the metal still shiny. I scented man, man dung, man sweat. But there was no one here.

  The door was thick and unlocked. I shouldered my way in, and then stood warily, thinking: trap.

  And yet when I examined the interior, it was not a dangerous place. The man scent mingled with the pleasant funk of mice. A tripod was set up at one window port, the mount for a telescope which was not present. There was a small propane stove and some packets of freeze dried beef burgundy. There was a white cup with the emblem of a humpbacked whale. There was a dictionary, a Merck Manual, the instruction manual to a computer, and a baseball encyclopedia.

  There was a neat stack of Science magazines, and a sheaf of sharpened pencils held together with a rubber band. All was cold, unused for weeks. The computer was gone, and there were few clothes in the closet. A rusty Coleman lantern hung on a nail. A roll of kindling rested beside a small pyramid of pine cones and a yellowing sports section. There were a few lengths of firewood, the lichen on the bark aged white.

  And yet there was a general feel of order, goose down sleeping bags rolled and tucked under a bunk, matches on a shelf beside a box of powdered milk. A khaki jumpsuit hung on a nail beside a parka so ratty and stained that it had been left, apparently, as a refuge for mice. There was a pair of oversize ski boots—size thirteen at least—which were so worn out as to be useless except to keep feet warm inside the cabin. There were hooks on the wall and shelves where equipment had been hanging, and a weather station, a slatted wooden box on a pole, stood watch not far downhill. One of the ports had a good view of it, as though the men here wanted to see where they were going before they left this shelter each morning. On one slanting roof wall was a photograph, where some men would staple a pinup. It was the picture of a wolf.

  I felt the picture had been tacked to the plywood as a gesture of affection, but it reminded me of other, actual trophies, stuffed heads and animal pelts. I sniffed, backing out of the shelter. Men were dangerous. Still, I sensed the purposefulness of these men. There was no trouble here.

  I was happy, though, to back out of the A-frame, and head downslope. I found the scent I sought, and followed it until I stopped, and nosed the air. They were close. So close they must see me.

  They must be shadowing me, even now.

  Wolves. They were watching me. I could feel it in my fur and in my breath. The air told me nothing. The slopes around me were various shades of white and gray, glittering in one place, ash-gray in another. Nothing moved. And yet I felt it in the way my fur prickled, and the way my ears cocked. They were watching me as I hurried, snout to the snow.

  I think I expected the sort of greeting I had received at the zoo, so far away and, in my mind, so long ago. There I had been celebrated as one of their own, without hesitation. But what happened here was another reminder: this was a foreign place.

  He was standing across a valley when I first saw him. He was perfectly still, and had been watching me for a long time. I barked a greeting, but he merely trotted parallel to my course, and did not answer.

  To see a wolf in his land made me slow down, and feel my way along the ice. This was the master of this place. This was a creature who knew all the languages of the hunt. That was what stunned me about him more than anything else: the way he carried himself. He knew. He knew everything. And I was empty in my soul, still a man somewhere in my blood and bowels. I would never be what he was.

  He was big. Not as big as I was, but larger than any wolf I had seen before. He was silvery, except for two dark ears. He trotted patiently, and whenever I worked my way closer, he retreated watchfully. He lifted a leg to splash a boulder, and then trotted onward. He was arrogant when he turned to watch me. All that I had considered about my own power was exactly echoed in his attitude.

  You are of only mild interest to me, he seemed to say. Of only mildest interest, and yet I believe I will keep an eye on you.

  I decided to show him what I could do. I gathered myself, and bounded high over a boulder, so high a current of colder air combed the hair of my spine. When I landed, I continued to frisk across the frozen slope.

  I had hoped that he would join me in an impromptu sport. He did nothing. He merely watched. He was a measuring spectator, however. When I turned to let him catch up with me he did not hurry. He took his time, picking his way across the ice.

  I had made a mistake. My attempt to impress him only made him see one thing: I was not a wolf.

  Then I saw it, the place he had been leading me to. I had been unaware that he was bringing me anywhere, and I was shaken by his guile, as well as what I saw before me.

  The snow was scarred, and a great frozen pond of blood glistened. The smell of wolf was strong, everywhere, in the snow, saturating the air, wolf and man. Boot prints tore the surface. A cigarette butt festered in the ice. Two deep cuts in the snow told me what had happened.

  A helicopter had set down here, after gunning a wolf. The men had climbed out of the helicopter, and celebrated the kill. Then they had gathered the body, and themselves, and ascended into the air, leaving the land here afraid of everything strange, everything foreign, forever wary.

  Leaving this blood turned to stone.

  It was late in the day when the four found me, a young male and three females, their tails carried like flags of greeting. They sniffed me, polite, and seeing no reason to be shy. I was one of their own, they seemed to say. It was not the romping greeting I had hoped for, but they were welcoming enough.

  Dark Ears joined us immediately. He was suddenly there, his ears upright, one paw raised, unmoving. The others froze in place.

  He spoke once, a hard syllable. The others melted away, and I was alone with him.

  He took one step forward, and the hair along his spine rose in a bristling ridge. His snout wrinkled, baring his teeth. Unlike a dog, he did not display the teeth as a warning. There was no long wait for me to retreat, impressed by his display.

  He was on me at once, his teeth in the heavy fur of my throat. I picked him up and hurled him, but full strength had not returned to my shoulders, and he plunged through the air at me immediately. I danced away, his teeth snapping in the air.

  We circled each other. My own snout wrinkled, my own teeth exposed and icy in the wind. My hackles bristled. My growls were a battery of guns. He must have heard nothing like them before, but he never hesitated. He was on me again, but this was not the ambush of a cat.

  I caught him, although the force of his plunge rocked me. I hammered him with the side of my forepaw, trying not to claw him. He lunged again, and this time I threw him, and he landed hard, skidding, spinning across the snow.

  He dived in low so I had to whip to one side to protect my belly from the flash of his incisors. I nipped at him, and found his flesh through his fur.

  The blood of a wolf tastes like any other bloo
d. Hot salt water, flesh-broth. But the taste of this blood stung me, and filled me with a sensation like a child’s first taste of brandy. It tasted hot, much hotter than it really could have been, and yet there was a deep perfume to it.

  It reminded of the time I put the fangs in my mouth for the first time, in my study, in another lifetime. The flavor had been like this.

  This sensation was so stunning that I could barely block the wolf’s continuing attacks. The strangest flavor broke over not only my tongue, but my entire body. In my numbness, I grappled with the wolf, his slaver scalding my eyes. Once again, I hurled him away.

  Then, acting entirely on a memory I did not know I possessed, I did exactly the right thing. I had entertained the thought of rolling on my back, exposing my belly in the language of surrender. But I had doubts about this plan. As large as I was—and I had learned that size was nearly everything in such confrontations—he might decide that even in the act of surrender I was simply too formidable a beast to have in his pack. I had the vivid mental image of my guts torn out, all over the snow. This was not a careless opponent. I had to do exactly the right thing.

  And so I ran. I scrambled over stones and ice, and then I spun to confront him. His breath was hot, but he fell short of throwing himself upon me.

  Go away go away go away, his snarls commanded. Before, he had only wished me dead.

  Backing away, still facing him, I retreated. I knew that I could kill him if I had to.

  Leave this place leave this place don’t stay another moment, he growled.

  We both knew I could kill him. I was stronger, if not as quick. But I did not want to harm this animal. He was a worthy leader. He had felt my greater strength. He knew me well. It would be a long battle, but I would wear him out, unless he got in a fortunate bite. It didn’t matter. He had no choice.

  As I sidled, careful to show my teeth, he cantered after me, careful to swing wide so he would not actually reach me. I mounted an outcropping, and panted down at him. He planted his feet, and gazed after me with a look like a laugh.

  You, his laugh said. You, Strange One.

  Master some other place, his silent laugh said. You do not belong here.

  I loped through the growing darkness. I did not belong. I was strange. This was not my place. These thoughts dripped in my mind, unceasingly, and the strangest current swept over me, my legs, my spine, to the scythe of my tail.

  The battle I had just fought, the failure of my quest, did not trouble me now. Something even more profound had happened. Something had changed in me when I tasted the wolf’s blood, something so sweeping that for the first time in days I felt lost.

  I did not know what I was, and I did not know how I was going to survive. The air was laced with strange, impossible fragrances, cinnamon, clove, musk. Sounds splashed over me, chimes, chirps, like the twittering of unseen birds.

  The sensations were sweet, but my stomach was cold. What was I to do? Where was I to go? Should I try to tag after the wolves, following them, a satellite of the pack? That was a barren plan, and yet I could not even determine where I was to spend this night. I had no destination, and I was exhausted. Exhausted, and profoundly troubled. Something deep within me had changed.

  At that moment, as the dark was perfect, and I had to travel by smell and feel alone, I felt it again. Once again, that suspicion so strong it stopped me, and turned me south.

  Something was after me.

  I rocked back to my haunches, and lifted my call. I lifted it, trying to touch the stars with it, the stars which, on this night, I could not see.

  I never heard whatever answer there might have been. There was a rumble and the air began to flutter around me. The air itself was shattering. Space was fragmenting, splintering around me, pattering to the ground.

  I lapped at it with my tongue, and it was so cold it burned, but it was only snow. Only snow, I reassured myself. But it was a thick pelt that filled the air, and I could not see. All scent vanished. There was nothing but blank black.

  And then the wind struck.

  Thirty-Three

  I rolled, and scrambled to my feet, but the blizzard was so strong it swept me off my feet again. It was an explosion of wind from dead north.

  I considered digging a burrow, coiling within it, and sleeping through the storm. But what if I never woke? I was still weak from the cat, and the encounter with Dark Ears had drained me further. I could not risk being turned into so much frozen meat. I no longer trusted my wolf shape. It was not what it seemed to be.

  Somewhere here, lost in the thundering dark, there was a shelter. It was a shelter built for men, and it was somewhere ahead of me, directly south. I tried to detect my trail in the snow, but that was hopeless. The blizzard clawed all trace of the surface away, and I had to guess where I was going, blundering, half-swimming through snow. If I knew where north was—and I did, because the wind poured unstinting as a cataract, directly from the Pole—then I knew my other directions as well.

  But I could not find it. I was lost, and I would have to wander, or find a hole, and curl up and risk my life in sleep. My paws were lead, and ice clotted my lashes.

  I stumbled, thrashed, snarling at the snow.

  Die, I told it. Go away and die.

  And then I smelled pine tar. Just a thread of it, from off to my right. In my blindness I had lumbered past it, and I climbed, the blizzard raking my fur. The rumble of the wind was twisted into a howl where the A-frame sliced it. I rose to my hind legs.

  I fell into the cabin, heavy with the snow that spattered from me onto the floor. I closed the door, fighting the wind, and then I collapsed. I could sleep now, I told myself. I was safe.

  The walls of the A-frame shuddered. The floor groaned. It was wise of the naturalists, if that is what they were, to choose their winters far from here. As the wooden structure staggered under the wind, I decided that now was the time I wanted to revisit, perhaps for the last time, my human form. I could do something I remembered from my human life, centuries ago.

  I could build a fire. But I knew that my paw/hands would not have the dexterity for this basic, human endeavor. Only a human hand could make fire.

  I was desperate for a new plan. My old drive, the hope, the great faith, was gone. I could not join the wolves for the blunt reason that I was not a wolf. I was something else. Still a creature of nature, still something of a miracle. But I did not belong here.

  However, merely wishing a return to human form did not always make it happen. I shook my fur, sure that I simply had trouble concentrating. But I was like a man unable to remember a phone number, or a name. I simply could not trigger the transformation. I stood on four legs in the darkness of a cabin, and I was a human wolf. There was nothing I could do to force it.

  Until at last it began.

  It was slow. My teeth ached. My bones burned. The pain surprised me. It had been so simple, but now, once again, it was a cramp that tossed me from bunk to stove, gasping. All feeling faded, and I was unconscious for a while, because I woke only when my shivering was so violent that it jerked my arms and legs.

  I was a naked human being, and I was freezing to death. I stuffed newspaper into the stove, added a pine-cone, and was too convulsed with cold to get a match out of the box. My hand shook the box back and forth, and matches pattered all over the floor in the dark.

  I broke one, and then another. The third sputtered sulphur before it died. When I did have a fire going, the newspaper was so damp the flame died immediately. Gasping, I groped more matches from the floor and managed to trick a fire under the pinecone. When it blazed, white flame sparkling, sap sizzling, I added kindling, and a chunk of wood, until there was a blaze.

  My eyes smarted; I had to twist the handle to the damper. Smoke was making tears stream from my eyes. And all the while my feet were numb, and feeling melting from my hands. I promised myself that this was my final experience in human form. A human body could scarcely function in such cold.

  It was an effic
ient stove. The wind rumbled outside, and I succumbed to the small, human comforts of sweating in the heat of a fire, and reading the instructions on a packet of freeze-dried turkey casserole. I brushed a comma of mouse dung off the package of food. It was a race within my nervous system whether exhaustion or hunger would be the stronger.

  I was glad I did not have a mirror. I could only imagine my wounds. My back was healing, but certain quick moves stung badly. It must look terrible, I told myself with rueful pride. There was a plastic gallon of water in one of the cupboards, and the propane stove blinked into flame.

  I stirred hot water into what looked like multicolored sawdust, and had something that resembled food. The smell alone was enough to make me weak: I had been very hungry. I did not bother with a spoon. I shoveled the steaming stuff into my mouth with my fingers, and licked them when I was done. The fire was bright and hot, and after a while I did not need to wear a sleeping bag like a shawl.

  A single pebble-gray mouse, whiskers a blur, darted to one of the matches I had left on the floor, and froze.

  I realized that I had not spoken a word of human speech for days. This little companion made me miss conversation. What a luxury it was to talk, and to listen, to others.

  I wanted so much to speak to the mouse, to tell it something, to comfort it with some sort of greeting. But, like an explorer blinking at a bank of microphones, I could only gape. I was thankful, I wanted to tell it, for its company.

  The mouse streaked to the wall, and followed it to a split in the plywood, and vanished. Its sudden absence made the A-frame seem like a cavern. There were drafts, under the door and around the windows, and whenever these licks of wind touched me, I huddled. I had never been so apart from human beings before. I had not felt this when I ran as a wolf. Only now, reinstated, or reduced, to my man’s body did I feel how far I was from any human, and how dangerous it could be to sit here, with a tiny amount of food, and three more chunks of firewood.

  Not dangerous to my wolf self, but then I had to remind myself that I was not a wolf. Not entirely. Enough of a wolf to fool nearly everyone but myself, and the rare, shrewd beast. The wolf pinup on the wall stared back at me, a reminder of what I could not be.